A much discussed topic is how much crime is impacted by which politicians win elections.
The best evidence for voting helping to make the streets safer is the New York City experience, where liberal NYC voters defeated the Democratic nominee for mayor five times in a row starting in 1993, and even when they elected a liberal Democrat in 2013, Bill de Blasio felt it prudent to employ Giuliani’s top cop Bill Bratton for his first term. Homicides fell heroically during the 24 years of the Giuliani-Bloomberg-Bratton Era:
September 24, 2022
By: Ted Dabrowski and John KlingnerChicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot and Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker are increasingly pushing back with ad hominem attacks and calls of “racism” against any criticism of their failed crime policies. That’s their typical response to those that oppose the city’s loose criminal justice policies and the state’s end of cash bail starting Jan.1, 2023.
But neither politician can escape the reality that they’ve lost control over the city’s crime. One statistic that particularly captures their failure is Chicago’s homicide rate compared to that in big-city peers New York and Los Angeles.
Chicago’s homicide rate year to date in 2022 is 18.4 for every 100,000 residents. That’s five times higher than New York’s homicide rate of 3.6 per 100,000 and 2.5 times higher than LA’s 7.5 per 100,000 homicide rate.
Those numbers aren’t just a post-George Floyd, post-Covid phenomenon. About a year ago, Wirepoints looked at a study of Chicago’s homicide rate and found the city broke ranks from New York and Los Angeles’ in the 1990s.
Chicago’s murder rate never dropped to the lower levels experienced by the bigger two cities over the last two decades. Instead, it has remained distressingly high.
At the city’s current run rate, there will be more than 26 homicides per 100,000 Chicagoans by the end of 2022. While that will be down slightly vs. 2020 and 2021 (avg. 29 per 100,000), it’s still far above the 18.5 murders per 100,000 in 2019.
